Growing, cooking and eating in Tottenham, north London (while Mouse checks in the shopping)

Saturday, 2 May 2009

Saturday salad

A lovely sunny Saturday calls for a salad and one of my great stand-bys is a potato and coriander salad, based on a Sophie Grigson recipe from Sophie's Table. I must have read the recipe nearly 20 years ago, and I've been making it ever since. It's a lovely mix of soft buttery potatoes, lemon and coriander tang and mellow, grassy olive oil.

Boil your salad potatoes with a few stalks of coriander - when tender, drain, fish out the coriander and bin, cut the potatoes into chunks. Add some sliced spring or red onion, the juice of a lemon, a good slug of olive oil, and a handful of chopped coriander and mint. Stir well so that all the potato chunks are coated with the dressing. That's it. I normally leave it for a couple of hours so that the warm potato can drink in the lemony liquid. It keeps well in the fridge for a couple of days.

Also on the Tottenham salad table tonight: some smokey aubergine combined with pekmez, yoghurt and chopped mint, hard boiled egg with wild garlic mayonnaise, some Greek gigantic beans in dressing, serrano ham. And I must reread Sophie's Friends for more old favourites.